Guest view: We need a discussion on global warming

I want to talk — not shout, scream or argue — about climate change, the issue that Karl Rove recently declared to be “gone.”

Orin Domenico

I want to talk — not shout, scream or argue — about climate change, the issue that Karl Rove recently declared to be “gone.”

I want to continue dialogue on this issue because if Rove and others who do not believe that global warming is a product of human activity are wrong, we will bequeath our children and grandchildren a set of catastrophic consequences far more dire than those that might result from our burgeoning national debt.

To be clear, I do believe that global warming is now being driven by human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. This is a belief founded, not like my belief in God, which rests on intuitive knowing and personal experience, but rather on a thoughtful examination of the evidence presented by those who have studied the ongoing change.

In order to further promote the dialogue, I need to disclose a few facts about myself that might defuse the sort of knee-jerk reactions and stereotyping that so dominate our current national discourse.
First, I consider myself a conservative, in the older sense of that term. I am not now nor have I ever been a liberal or progressive.

Second, I am not a fan of Al Gore, did not vote for him and have not been influenced by him on this issue.

Third, I do not ordinarily place much faith in modern science, particularly in those areas that involve the testing of products, like pharmaceuticals, food additives, pesticides and fertilizers for safety or in scientific assurances that procedures such as hydrofracking or offshore oil drilling are safe. I always want to know who is sponsoring and paying for the research and how that money might be influencing findings.

A few questions

With that, I want to ask those who hold opposing viewpoints a few thoughtful questions to which I would like direct thoughtful responses, not rote recitations of ideas from Michael Creighton or Fox News or bringing up the so called Climate-gate “scandal,” investigations of which have shown it to be inconsequential. I would, of course, be happy to respond to questions in return.

Global warming skeptics are often eager to point out that climate change has been going on for millions of years. They point out that there were once glaciers here in Central New York, as if those who study climate change were unaware of these facts and as if the idea of man-made global warming sprung full blown from some liberal think tank.

The dire predictions on global warming originate not with Al Gore or George Clooney, but with professional climatologists who have dedicated their lives to studying climate change. Though their projections might come from computer programs, the hard data that went into those computers comes from years of meticulous field work looking at how the earth’s climate has changed over millions of years and at how that rate of change has altered during the present industrial epoch as the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased.

No collusion here

Among serious climatologists there is little disagreement about the reality of human-caused global warming or that continuing on our current path will lead to dire environmental, social and economic consequences during the next 100 years. To suggest that global warming is a hoax is to suggest that either thousands of scientists are colluding to create false conclusions from intentionally skewed data or that the entire scientific method of carefully, peer-reviewed research (the same kind that goes into discovering the causes of heart disease or cancer) is wrong. Which is it?

If climate scientists are perpetrating a hoax, who is the beneficiary, whose interests are they serving? This is an important question because in order to buy false results on this scale someone would have to be spending many millions of dollars on the research to make it look real. They would have to be buying off thousands of government, university and independent researchers from around the world, including the top climate people at NASA. What would they be getting back from their investment in this vast conspiracy?

The fledgling alternative energy industry doesn’t have that kind of bucks. What do we believe is the point of the whole thing? Are there just people out there on the left, who simply hate jobs and prosperity? And, where is the money trail linking the perpetrators to the conspiratorial scientists?

Damage is evident

Finally, global warming aside, I find it difficult to believe that anyone my age, who has lived through the last half century, can honestly deny the damage that our way of life is doing to the planet. The oceans are dying, we are running out of clean water, environmentally caused cancer is epidemic. This is all very scary stuff, but Americans have faced scary things before. And if we cannot face the danger of climate change, are we saying to the generations to come that we just do not care if they have a livable planet?

Are we more willing to help the short-term profits of corporations that may or may not get passed along to the rest of us than we are to do what we can to help secure the long-term health of the planet?

The scientists who are putting forth global warming theory say that we have little time left, if any, to act to mitigate its worst effects. Do we really have the luxury to accept Rove’s declaration and resign ourselves to national inaction for the next two years?

If the scientific community is right, addressing our economic problems without at the same time addressing climate change is going to provide us with very short-term solutions. As a first step toward the strong action that is required we might initiate a new dialogue on this issue.